The photolithography is a process used to form a circuit pattern of a semiconductor chip or a display element from a semiconductor wafer or a glass for the display element. The photoresist composition is the most essential materials to the photolithography process. So, recently, as the patterns for semiconductor devices and the display elements are finer, the need for the photoresist composition having high resolution is more increased.
Conventional acid-amplified photoresist composition includes a polymer resin, a photo-acid generator (PAG) and a base additive. Since the conventional photoresist composition includes the polymer resin as a main component, it has excellent mechanical properties such as processiblity, coating stability, etching resistance and can be easily removed after the succeeding process including an etching process, an ion implantation process etc. It has been known that the size of the polymer resin determines the critical resolution of the photoresist composition. That is, when the size of the polymer resin of the photoresist composition is larger than the pattern to be formed, it is difficult to form a fine pattern in a desired resolution. Also, since the polymer resin is an aggregate of polymer chains having various structures and sizes, i.e. non-uniform mixture, it is more difficult to form a fine pattern using the polymer resin. Accordingly, it has been known that by using the conventional photoresist composition, manufacturing a fine-structured semiconductor device having a design rule of less than 65 nm is difficult. For overcoming the above mentioned problems, a study of new photoresist materials which can substitute for the polymer resin is demanded.